On 'Independence Day: Resurgence' And Its Self-Sabotaging Sequel Set-Up

Scott Mendelson
, ContributorI cover the film industry.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

'Independence Day: Resurgence' image courtesy of 20th Century Fox

There is much to discuss regarding what went wrong with the release of Independence Day: Resurgence. Some of the blame must go to the finished film itself, which was flawed enough concerning quality and entertainment value that 20th Century
Fox made a point not to show it to domestic press. I discussed at length why I think the film didn’t work in my actual theatrical review, but this morning I would like to address one particular aspect.

Independence Day: Resurgence spends much of its abbreviated running time laying groundwork for a third film, one which involves a new and exciting dynamic for the franchise. So, all told, why didn’t we get a movie based on that dynamic instead of this retread? Consider it another big-budget franchise-starter that spent the whole movie setting up the movie we wanted to see.

Independence Day: Resurgence goes out of its way to set up its sequel, to the point of undercutting its story. Spoiler alert, but we spend ample screen time dealing with a third alien presence, one that reveals itself to be peaceful and hyper-intelligent/evolved. The film ends with the current threat defeated but with the potential for our heroes to engage in interstellar travel and take the fight to the invading aliens’ home world.

That’s a pretty cool idea, right? Video game fans will tell you that it’s similar to Destiny, and I’ll take their word on that. Roland Emmerich and friends spent $165-$200 million on the as-is rehash of the first film, while ending on a big sequel tease. Said film got terrible reviews and is doing relatively poorly at the domestic and worldwide box office. So as a result, it is entirely possible that we’ll never get to see an Independence Day movie with our heroes bouncing from alien world to alien world fighting back would-be hostile forces before they have a chance to invade Earth in the first place.

NeoCon symbolism ("We fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here!") notwithstanding, that would be something we haven’t seen before (at least not since Starship Troopers nineteen years ago) and certainly something we haven’t seen in an ID4 movie. That hypothetical film would have almost surely been better received than the glorified remake that we ended up with. So why didn’t we get it?

Well, it's no secret that the original plan was to create a new Independence Day franchise. I don't just mean a new Independence Day movie, but rather at least two new Independence Day movies. They could have made a full-on “heroes invade alien home world” sequel. Or they could have made a 2.5-hour movie which opens with an invasion, ends its second act with a triumph over the invaders, and then spends its third act with a “take the war to them” action finale. But both options would have left the filmmakers without a plot available for a third Independence Day movie.

Come what may, because the filmmakers wasted audience goodwill on this inferior sequel, we may never get to see the interesting idea that this whole second film set up. Even though it was technically a sequel, this second Independence Day was a classic case of a failed franchise-starter/botched origin story. Like any number of failed “origin story franchise-starters,” Independence Day: Resurgence spent its running time leading up to the movie you wanted to see.

And that is the difference between the origin stories that work (Warner Bros./
Time Warner Inc.’s Batman Begins,
Sony’s Casino Royale, Paramount/
Viacom Inc.’s Star Trek) and the ones that don’t (Universal’s Robin Hood, Fox’s Fantastic Four, Universal/Comcast Corp.’s Jem and the Holograms). The former gives you an hour of origin story and then another hour of our heroes being the heroes we wanted to see. The latter spends the whole time setting up the premise and characters you came to see and then says “Okay, you’ll get what you want in the next film, we promise!”

Independence Day: Resurgence amounted to 119 minutes of set-up with an implied promise that the next movie would be really neat. Sad to say, you can’t do that to paying audiences. Especially in hindsight, Emmerich and company should have made that Independence Day sequel with our heroes traveling to the alien world to kick butt and worried about the next installment after the fact.

In this “we gotta have a franchise” mentality, there was arguably either an assumption that this second film would be a success or concern that making a second movie based around the “new” story idea would leave the filmmakers without a place to go for the third film. It’s likely (especially in hindsight) that audiences would have been more willing to embrace an ID4 sequel that wasn’t a redo of the first one.

Consumers and fans didn’t need an entire “welcome back to this world” sequel before getting to the good stuff. But, in this day-and-age, it’s almost shocking when a major franchise entry tells a complete story from beginning to end in a given film without acting as a glorified coming attraction for the next movie. In retrospect, it’s almost an act of courage that Chris Nolan told the entire Harvey Dent story within the 152-minutes of The Dark Knight.

Independence Day itself was a perfect closed-ended film back in 1996. Had Emmerich and company been willing to make an equally open-and-shut narrative twenty years later, we might have had a very different result at the box office this weekend. But in the desire to make a franchise, they killed their own sequel and thus may never get to make the sequel they wanted to make. They cut off their nose to spite their face.

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